North Jersey Cubans recall missile crisis anxiety

Gladys Sanchez of Paramus was ready to leave Cuba with her young son when the Cuban missile crisis delayed her plans.

While U.S. presidential candidates explain their stance on Iran and its nuclear enrichment program on the campaign trail, North Jersey Cubans recalled this month the nuclear crisis five decades ago that left their island nation at the center of a potential war between two world powers.

Fifty years ago this month, President John F. Kennedy announced to the American people that the Soviet Union had planted nuclear missiles in Cuba. The president demanded the warheads be removed. Tense negotiations between the two countries began, and the possibility of an invasion — or even a nuclear war — loomed.

The Caribbean nation, only 90 miles away from Florida, was already under the control of Fidel Castro's revolutionist government, just as it remains today. Only now, brother Raul is president and the elder dictator has retreated from public life, though he resurfaced last week to dispel rumors about his failing health.

In October 1962, Cubans on the island were still getting used to the new regime. A few who opposed the government and its oppressive policies said they secretly hoped the crisis would lead to an attack, even if it resulted in mass casualties.

"There were people in Cuba, older generations, that were looking for help from the U.S. and the invasion," said Remberto Perez of Tenafly, a vice president of the Cuban-American National Foundation based in Miami. "I don't think they really understood the nuclear war experience."

Gladys Sanchez of Paramus said she was among those living on the island not scared about the possibility of war. By then, she said, officials had made it impossible for her and other residents to visit family or friends without first notifying neighborhood committees formed by the revolution. She said the constant reporting of her whereabouts was stifling.

"In our minds we thought, hopefully, Americans would come in and tumble the government," Sanchez said. "I hoped that communism would end, even if it meant that I would be killed."

Castro supporters also spoke of giving up their lives if it meant destroying the United States, said Juan Antonio Blanco, head of the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Initiatives at Miami-Dade College.

"That was a time of strong ideological beliefs, and also a time of a lot of ignorance of the realities of nuclear war," said Blanco, who was 15 at the time, and whose father was a member of the Communist Party. "I don't think that was understood by some people, even at the highest level of government in some places. In Cuba, there was a notion that we could win a war against the United States."

Spy plane's findings

The Cuban missile crisis, as the nearly two-week period came to be known in history, began on Oct. 16, 1962, a few days after a U.S. Air Force spy plane obtained images of nuclear missile sites on the island. Kennedy, in his televised speech, announced that the United States had obtained "unmistakable evidence" that a series of offensive missile sites was on the island, and that its purpose was to "provide a nuclear strike capability against the Western Hemisphere."

"Cuba would have been the epicenter of this huge catastrophe," said Pedro Roig, a senior research associate and history professor for The Institute for Cuban and Cuban-American Studies at the University of Miami. "If ever that war had evolved, Cuba and the Cuban people would have suffered more than anyone else."

By the time Kennedy announced the crisis to the public on Oct. 22, 1962, he had already ordered Navy ships to surround the island to prevent more weapons from being delivered. Cuba's airports were shuttered, and communication to the outside world was limited.

Sanchez and her 14-month-old son were preparing to flee the United States, where her husband, Luis, who had left the island months earlier, was waiting. The blockade, however, prevented her from pursuing those plans. Her plane tickets from Havana to Miami on Oct. 26, 1962, were useless.

"They closed off all of Cuba, and there was no direct flight from Havana to the United States," she recalled.

She probed neighbors for information, and listened to radio newscasts originating from the United States to get the latest reports.

Roig, who has authored books on Cuba, said the communist government did little to inform the public about the standoff and its potential consequences.

"There was no discussion on how to protect the Cuban people," he said. "The Cuban people were in limbo basically."

José Millares, who lived in the capital of Havana at the time, remembers that any information disseminated by the government was incomplete.

"They would tell us the United States was going to invade, but they didn't clarify what was really happening about the missiles and the motives for the potential war," said Millares, who now lives in Paramus.

Millares had just quit his bank job, was in the process of securing permission to enter the United States, and dreamed of making a better life for his young daughter. The incident left him unable to get off the island.

"I was left in the air with no job, and with a daughter and wife, and not knowing what was going to happen next," Millares said.